Dear Ms Potter,

Freedom of Information request - Internal Review

I am writing about your request for an Internal Review of our handling of your Freedom of Information Request. I have now completed my review and am in a position to offer you a substantive reply. I also attach a copy of the final reply that we attempted, unsuccessfully, to send to you on 24 June.

As you are aware, section 10(1) of the Freedom of Information Act requires that, ordinarily, we respond to requests within 20 working days. Your request was received by us on 30^th January 2009 and the statutory date for our response to you would ordinarily have been 27 February 2009. However section 10(3) of the Act permits public authorities to extend the deadline for a “reasonable” period to allow for the consideration of the public interest test in relation to qualified exemptions. As you were informed in this case, section 10(3) was invoked to allow for the consideration of the section 31 exemption. Nonetheless I recognise that the length of time for which the deadline was extended exceeded the Information Commissioner's recommended maximum of an additional 20 days being claimed for this purpose, and that the length of time taken to conclude the case cannot be regarded as being “reasonable”. I am also aware that you have not yet received a substantive reply to your request, despite our assessment of the case having been completed some time ago, for reasons explained below. I hope you will accept my apologies for the significant delay in responding to you.

During the course of this internal review I found out that part of the delay was due to us trying to ensure that we met our obligations under Freedom of Information Act and that the response sent to you is FOI compliant. For instance we had to determine whether the information you requested was held and after this had been retrieved we had to agree on what was suitable for disclosure and what was not and why. The deadline was extended under section 10(3) in relation to the latter point, although the length of this extension became too long.

I also discovered that the final response was ready to be sent to you on 24^th June 2009, but that you did not receive it. This further aggravated the delay in this case, and came about because we had trouble sending you the response and attachments via email. In your initial FOI request you included instructions of how to send you the information requested i.e. to enter the username and password, but this was overlooked and when we tried to send you the response it generated a `failure notice' and was not delivered to your email address. As we did not have any other means to contact you, we were unable to get the response to you.

I have attached the response we had difficulty getting to you on 24^th June.

I fully recognise that in the handling of your case the Home Office has failed to meet its obligation to respond within 20 working days as set out in section 10(1) of the FOI Act, or within a reasonable time as permitted in circumstances relevant in this case as set out in section 10(3). I offer my sincere apologies for this.

Should you remain dissatisfied with my response, you have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner as established by Section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act. The Information Commissioner's address is:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House, Water Lane

Wilmslow, Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely,

O. Awosanya

Information Access Policy Team

Freedom of Information